mortality | ConservationBytes.com

Projecting global deaths from covid19

18 03 2020

covid

I know that it’s not the best way to project expected deaths from a pandemic disease, but being something of a demographer, I just couldn’t help myself.

I therefore took the liberty of punching in some basic probabilities into our world population model to see how many people could potentially die from covid19. But this is not an epidemiological model, so I’m probably vastly over-estimating the total death rates.

Nonetheless, the results were revealing.

I first took the expected mortality by age class based on the Chinese data so far. I then assumed a worst-case scenario of a 60% infection rate (i.e., 3 out of 5 of us will eventually catch the virus). I assumed these values across the entire globe (not taking into account greater or lesser susceptibility or probability of death among countries or regions).

I also considered two more scenarios: (i) double the mortality rate (in each age class), and (ii) the disease outbreak lasting two years instead of just one.

The graph below shows the four different outcomes based on these scenarios relative to the baseline (no covid): Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: corona, corona virus, covid19, deaths, disease, epidemiology, modelling, mortality, population model, predictions, sars-cov2
Categories : conservation, disease, human overpopulation, population dynamics

Adult disguises

2 12 2019

Skilled ornithologists can tell the age of a bird by the look of its feathers. But many species are advancing the moult of their first adult plumage in response to global warming, and the youngsters look more similar to the adults now than two centuries ago.

The clothes don’t make the (wo)man, but how we dress sends out a lot of information about our tastes, emotional state, or financial situation. In nature, where species have evolved to exploit all kinds of physical and chemical cues, visual communication determines a wealth of feeding and reproductive strategies (1).

Birds are familiar to all of us by the beauty and variety of their plumages (see extreme examples commented by David Attenborough here, here and here), which bird fans use to tell juveniles from males, males from females and breeders from migrants. In evolutionary time, birds have gradually moved away from tree-bark browns and tree-leaf greens and, due to functional requirements, modern feathers only span about one third of the colours these animals can perceive (2). They obtain yellows, oranges, and reds from carotenoid-containing food, dark colours from melanin pigment of own synthesis, and the so-called structural colours depend on how light reflects on the barbs of the feathers (2).

Plumage, across its entire range of designs, is a factor crucial to the life history of our feathery friends and, consequently, to evaluate how and how much anthropogenic climate change is impacting them (3).

Plumage and temperature

We know that mammals and birds are modifying their fur and feathers to optimise camouflage against landscapes with more or less snow (4), but less-known are the implications of climate change for feather moulting. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: biodiversity, birds, climate change, mortality, moulting, plumage, survival
Categories : anthropocene, behaviour, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, ecology, invasive species

Who are the healthiest people in the world?

8 05 2017

healthy Apologies for the little gap in my regular posts — I am in the fortunate position of having spent the last three weeks in the beautiful Villa Serbelloni in the village of Bellagio on the shores of Lake Como (northern Italy) engaged in writing a new book with my good friend and colleague, Professor Paul Ehrlich. Both of us received an invitation to become ‘Bellagio Centre Residents‘ by the Rockefeller Foundation to write the book in, shall we say, rather lush circumstances.

While I can’t yet give away all the juicy details of the book itself (we’ve only written about a third of it so far), I wanted to give you a little taste of some of the interesting results we’ve so far put together.

Today’s topic is on human health, which as I’ve written many times before, is in many ways linked to the quality of the environment in which people live. We are currently looking at which countries have the best human health statistics, as well as the best environmental conditions in which to live. Read the rest of this entry »